Posting HTML Form Data as XML Strings

You may already understand what XML is all about, and you may be interested in how to use XML in existing applications or how to develop new ones that can easily be deployed in your environment. This article explains how you can use your existing Web infrastructure for such applications. XML's capability to describe the data in a human- and machine-readable format makes it very effective to bridge the boundaries of environments, formats, organizations, and time. XML expert Jasmit Kochhar leads you through the steps to use your existing Web infrastructure for designing XML-based applications.

Like this article? We recommend

Like this article? We recommend

You may already understand what XML is all about, and you may be interested
in how to use XML in existing applications or how to develop new ones that can
easily be deployed in your environment. This article explains how you can use
your existing Web infrastructure for such applications. Even though we demonstrate
the technique using Active Server Pages (ASP), the logic could as easily be
employed for a Java, Perl, or PHP application. It is assumed that the reader
can understand the ASP code, which has been extensively commented at each step
of the script. The example script demonstrates the capability to create XML
documents from data posted using HTML forms. The XML documents are saved in
a file on the file system.

Why XML?

The adoption of XML as a standard interface for conducting business
transactions is a fundamental shift in our approach to interact and share data
between different organizations and systems. Instead of organizations sharing
their data in a delimited file format using EDI or any of the plethora of
communication pipes, the pervasiveness of the Web and the acceptance of XML as a
language to describe data has made it an essential part of the IT
infrastructure. Similarly, although the Web provides us with a simple way to
interact with information resources from around the world, the organization and
the classification of data when marked up in HTML makes it difficult to search
for relevant information. XML's capability to describe the data in a human-
and machine-readable format makes it very effective to bridge the boundaries of
environments, formats, organizations, and time. Loosely coupled systems that
understand each other's data can exchange transaction information by
applying suitable transformations to the stream of XML data that they exchange
with each other. The added flexibility of using XSL to transform the XML data
from one format to another obviates the need to write hard-coded adapters.